Seeing through ABC's alleged transparency

Further to my earlier posting, and following a phone call from Audit Bureau of Circulations' executive Martyn Gates, it is clear that the regional newspaper figures have been presented in a new fashion by industry demand. Both the papers' owners and the media buyers who devised the change through the ABC council believe they offer greater transparency.

Media buyers (aka advertisers) want to see separate county-by-county statistics in case they are devising ad campaigns restricted to a certain geographical locality. And they want to see how individual owners are doing in order to pursue deals with those companies. That's fair enough.

However, that extra transparency has been at the cost of the sectoral presentation, which allowed analysts, among other things, to get a simple nationwide picture of circulation trends. So well done to Press Gazette for having spent time unscrambling the figures that resulted in its story, Regional press ABCs at a glance.

It found - no surprise - that print circulations across the regional industry in the first half of 2008 are heading downwards, with an average year-on-year drop among the 88 regional dailies of 5.2%.

It is surely not a coincidence that the ABC council introduced its new-fangled tables at the same time as aggregating paid-for sales and giveaway copies, so that the Manchester Evening News, for example, has managed to record an 86% year-on-year rise.

I understand that the ABC website is being revamped and, by the end of the year, it will become easy to obtain the data just as we choose.

But the net result of the ABC's auditing and presentational changes make independent analysis time-consuming and unnecessary.

However, as the regional papers' trade body, the Newspaper Society, has said continually for the last five years, it is no good looking only at print sales and distribution figures. Online traffic has to be included in order to show a paper's true "reach."

It is time, as the NS rightly argues, for website figures to be published alongside print figures. That would be the greatest transparency of all. But the ABC council needs to ensure that it does not muddy the waters for those of who are neither owners nor media buyers by seeking to make analysis more difficult.